Training in realistic situations often yields substantial performance improvement. However, such realistic training can pose a high risk to participants, especially if the training involves potentially dangerous tasks or operations in hostile and/or potentially threatening environments. So, to provide participants with reduced risk environments for training, the realistic situations can be simulated using motion capture, where the term ‘motion capture’ refers generally to capturing any appropriate motion of an object (animate or inanimate) in the real-world using appropriate sensors and translating the motion from the real-world to a motion of a computer-generated model (herein interchangeably referred to as ‘avatar’) of the object in a virtual environment.
In a motion capture simulation, the real-world environment may include a capture volume and participants disposed within the capture volume may be mapped to a virtual environment where each participant may be represented by their respective avatar. Further, the motion of the avatar in the virtual environment may be driven by a motion of the entity in the capture volume. Typically, the capture volume may be dimensionally constrained while their counterpart virtual environment may provide an unrestrained space for movement. For example, the capture volume may be the size of a basketball court, while the corresponding virtual environment to which an entity in the capture volume is mapped may be the size of a large town. The dimensional constraints of the capture volume may hinder a seamless navigation in the virtual environment. For example, the movement of a participant in the real world may be limited within the boundaries of a room while the corresponding virtual environment is much larger than the room.
To address limitations of movement arising from the dimensional constraints of the capture volume, when a participant reaches a dimensional constraint (e.g., boundary) of the capture volume, a system may redirect a participant from a previous direction to a different direction of movement in the capture volume while allowing the avatar of the participant to continue along the previous direction in the virtual environment. In other words, even though a participant's direction in the capture volume is changed, the avatar's direction in the virtual environment remains the same. This redirection of the participant's direction of movement in the capture volume and change in correlation between the movement of the participant and participant's respective avatar may be harmless when there is only one participant in the capture volume. However, when there are multiple participants, a redirection of one or more participants may cause the participants to collide with each other because the relative positions of the participants in the capture volume with respect to each other differ from the relative positions of their respective avatars with respect to each other's avatars in the virtual environment. Further, a difference in the relative positions of participants in the capture volume and the virtual environment may limit the ability of the participants to perform group activities in the virtual environment that may require the participants to be aligned in specific formations in the capture volume, for example, clearing a room which requires physical contact in a tight stacked formation in the capture volume, and carrying of one subject by another, e.g. a wounded soldier. In view of the foregoing discussion of representative shortcomings, need for improved mapping and navigation through the virtual environment that addresses the above-mentioned shortcomings is apparent.